Do you guys expose the docker socket to any of your containers or is that a strict no-no? What are your thoughts behind it if you don’t? How do you justify this decision from a security standpoint if you do?
I am still fairly new to docker but I like the idea of something like Watchtower. Even though I am not a fan of auto-updates and I probably wouldn’t use that feature I still find it interesting to get a notification if some container needs an update. However, it needs to have access to the docker socket to do its work and I read a lot about that and that this is a bad idea which can result in root access on your host filesystem from within a container.
There are probably other containers as well especially in this whole monitoring and maintenance category, that need that privilege, so I wanted to ask how other people handle this situation.
Cheers!
I don’t think you need socket access for this? This is what I did: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31149501/how-to-reach-docker-containers-by-name-instead-of-ip-address#35691865
Yeah, you are right a custom bridge network can do DNS resolution with container names. I just saw in a video from Lawrence Systems, that he exposed the socket. And somewhere else I saw that container names where used for the proxy hosts in NPM. Since the default bridge doesn’t do DNS resolution I assumed that is why some people expose the socket.
I just checked again and apparently he created the compose file with ChatGPT which added the socket. https://forums.lawrencesystems.com/t/nginx-proxy-manager-docker/24147/6 I always considered him to be one of the more trustworthy and also security conscious people out there, but this makes me question his authority. Atleast he corrected the mistake, so everyone who actually uses his compose file now doesn’t expose the socket.